COSMOS magazine

Friday, July 4

It was cold in the open night. Road was too grand a name for the rocky tracks meandering past the hillside where the cave made its unspectacular exit. Jill, Paul and Alex curled up on the blankets Maisie had sent for them and fell asleep. But Wayne doubted he would ever sleep again.

Something flashed in the corner of his eye. Two small glowing objects hovered just above Alex's head. They hummed, barely audible. Wayne wanted to ask the boy what the things were, but he knew he must be dreaming again, or trapped inside one of Dr. Rutherford's nightmares. He opened his mouth to cry aloud, but could not get his voice to work.

Listen to me, young man.

No! Wayne screamed in his mind, but his voice remained silent. He sank again, terror rising around him like drowning water.

The subject is a twenty-five year old male...

Friday, July 4

Long before he saw their headlights Alex heard the cars coming. He had to tell the adults; their ears didn't seem nearly as sharp as his, nor their eyes. In fact, they seemed to be duller than him all the way around. Paul had said something about the auxosomes working faster on younger people.

"Hey Mom! Hey, everybody, someone's coming," he whispered.

"Stay back until they get here," Jill said.

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "Could be the cops." He thought of sending out one of his little toys, but he didn't know their range for sure and was reluctant to risk losing one of them. He could feel Mom's tenseness, hear her rapid breathing as the headlights grew larger.

The car pulled up to the mouth of the cave, headlights splashing back on it, a bright red Mustang. Ambrosio opened the driver's door.

"You want to keep going straight ahead," he told them, without a greeting. "About a mile down this lane you'll come to the county road. If you turn right, it'll take you to FM 415. Go right again when you get to the highway. It'll take you to Sonora and from there you can get to Del Rio and go across into Mexico. My mother says you'll be safer over there."

"Thank you so much, Ambrosio," Mom said, but he was already walking away toward the pickup.

"I'll take the first shift driving," Paul offered. For once, Mom seemed glad to be just a passenger.

"C'mon Wayne. You and me can sit in back and keep a lookout behind," said Alex, climbing in.

"Which way you going?" Wayne called to Ambrosio.

"Back the way we came. To Villa Mirasol."

"Mind if I catch a ride with you in the pickup?"

"But—" Alex couldn't believe Wayne would just take off like this. "We're partners, remember?"

"You're right, young fella. Pardners forever. But there's a few things I have to do. I'll catch up with you later."

"No, Wayne! Come with us!"

Wayne got a weird expression on his face, dug into one pocket, thrust a folded piece of card into Alex's hand. It was still slightly damp. "These are some bad people, Alex. Maybe some day you and me can do something about them." He turned abruptly and climbed into the back of the pickup truck.

"Hey man," Ambrosio called to Paul as the truck backed up to turn around. "Take good care of my Mustang, okay? Dr. Roberta is giving him to me after you don't need him anymore."

Friday, July 4

They had been driving on the county road for about ten minutes when Alex yelled out sharply from the back seat, "Enemy chopper on our tail."

Jill sagged. For the first time since Judge Patterson's office she'd begun to feel hope, but now realized how foolish that had been. Two adults and a child in a ten year old car, escaping the police in a helicopter with their sophisticated equipment? Not to mention Bruce Blick or whoever the heck else was after them.

They made it almost to the highway, were just passing the sign that read "U.S. 277 1 mile'. Alex yelled, "Here they come. Hey Paul, stop the car please? I have a plan." The boy was pulling something out of his backpack.

"Might as well stop," said Paul. "No point trying to outrun them."

"Don't turn off the engine," said Alex. Paul frowned but left it running.

They sat silently in the growing roar of the chopper overhead. Bent over a GameBoy console he held in his lap, Alex seemed oblivious to the howling in the air.

"No crew," he said, looking up.

"What? Alex, honey, I don't—"

"It's a UAV. An unmanned aerial vehicle. Remote controlled." The helicopter pulled in front of them, hovered a few feet above the ground, dirt flung up from the country road. The machine was smaller than a standard chopper; in the night, this close, it looked like a gigantic, baleful insect.

"Darn," said Alex. "I hope they don't block the road when they go down. Be ready to hit the gas."

Jill saw Paul frown at her son, turn a questioning glance to her. She shrugged, shook her head. The noise was awful; it got worse as Alex rolled down his window, leaning far out. "Be careful!" she screamed, but couldn't be heard above the rotors. He threw something into the air, then again. To her disbelief, Jill saw two small glowing machines lift away on a trajectory toward the chopper. Alex wasn't watching any longer. With rapt, child-intense attention, he manipulated the keys on the GameBoy console in his hands.

"Main rotor pitch links," he was muttering, "that should do it."

She heard a high metallic shriek, like iron tearing. The roar from the UAV changed pitch.

"And if I can just get the other one into the tail rotor, come on, come on—"

Hanging in front of them like doom, the machine veered sharply to their left, lurched. The main rotor struck the ground. The UAV spun, flipped over. Thunder shook the air; a fireball exploded toward them.

"Go, Paul, go!" screamed Alex.

Paul had already hit the accelerator and they were screeching away. Jill looked back at her son, his face illuminated by the flames of what had been a multi-million dollar technological marvel.

"It's okay, Mom." Alex seemed to be reading her mind. "No crew in the helicopter. It was a UAV, like I told you, like in Iraq and Iran."

"You made it crash, right?"

"Yep." He grinned, still so much her little boy: Watch me, Mom!

"We'll have to ditch the car before too much longer," Paul said tensely. "They were close enough for their cameras to read our plates."

"We can't just leave the car on the highway. They'll know exactly which way we've gone."

"I know, we'll pull off the road someplace we can hide it." Paul sighed, and turned quickly with a grin. "Alex, thank you."

"My pleasure," the ten year old said, gravely polite.

Saturday, July 5

They had been walking for so long Jill's entire body was numb. She felt certain that if she glanced down she'd find her feet worn away to bloody stumps. Paul hadn't said anything for some time now. From his soft, groaning grunts she could tell he was running on sheer will power. He'd been carrying Alex on his back ever since the boy had hurt his ankle when he stumbled into a hole outside the old barn where they'd left the car.

She swung her bandana'd head at the sound growing louder at her back. Lights brightened, shone in her eyes. Paul said, in a voice stupid with exhaustion, "It's a truck."

No place to hide on this barren stretch of road. Jill steeled herself as the pickup truck pulled even with them, stopped.

"You folks need a ride?" Thick Spanish accent, speaking softly. The driver was a clean-cut man with dark skin. Jill noticed the pockmarks on his cheeks, as bad as her own. Beside him were two children and a woman, all asleep. "Climb in the back if you want. I'm going almost all the way to Del Rio."

Paul and Jill looked at each other. "Let's do it," she said.

"I was hoping you'd say that." Paul set Alex down in the tray and they climbed into the back of the truck. It was already filled nearly to the top with burlap bags weighted down by large stones.

"Nice and soft," said Paul. "I can think of worse ways to travel."

Jill loved him for remaining calm and upbeat even now. I can think of worse companions to travel with, she thought.

 

Sunlight shone in her eyes. The truck driver was leaning over her, a worried expression on his scarred face.

"I heard on the CB radio, there's a checkpoint up ahead. Your business is none of my business, but I thought... Well, maybe you don't want to be in the truck when they search it."

"Thank you," said Jill gratefully. She should have been stiff and sore after sleeping on a lumpy bed of burlap bags, but to her surprise she felt fine. Paul, too, seemed to be suffering no ill consequences from the recent hike.

"Want to climb on, sport?" he said to Alex, offering his back.

"Nope. I'm fine now." The boy proved his words by hopping down from the truck.

Jill and Paul looked at each other. "Auxosomes," she said, and simultaneously Paul said with a grin, "The Modern Miracle!"

"We're four or five miles from Del Rio," said the driver, glancing in puzzlement between them. "I know it's a long way to walk, but... You want to get off the highway out of sight whenever you hear a car coming. I heard on the radio the police are looking for a woman and man with a boy."

"Thank you." Jill took his hand, wishing there were something she could do to repay his kindness.

"It's nothing," he said, looking toward the cab of his truck. "I know how it is. I have a wife, kids."

 

They reached Del Rio around noon, went straight into the Fargo Grill and ordered the Saturday lunch, chicken fried steak. Jill and Paul cleaned up together in the bathroom; she kept her eyes averted, as always, from the mirror. He scrubbed her forehead clean with wadded toilet paper and cheap soap.

"The wound's closed right up," he muttered, astonished. "In fact, it's almost healed. Do you have any nail scissors in your purse?"

"Of course." Jill gritted her teeth as he snipped and pulled out the stitches. "Okay, buster, you can go now." To her relief, no one seemed to have taken any special notice of them. In the stall, she opened the envelope Ambrosio had given Paul and for the first time examined the contents. Three passports rubber banded together and a smaller envelope.

While Paul and Alex took their turns in the bathroom, she examined the passports under the edge of the table.

Benjamin K. Peters and Joyce Eileen Peters were travelling with Richard John Peters, whose baby picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Jill's memory of Alex at the age of nine or ten months. She noted with surprise and annoyance that they had airbrushed her photo, smoothing away the acne scars as well as the wound on her forehead. In the envelope she found $10,000 in hundred dollar bills.

"Bless Roberta Treadwell," said Paul, when she passed him the envelope and his passport.

"We can buy a car."

"No, Mom. We shouldn't buy a car." Alex spoke slowly, as if explaining things to a not-very-bright five year old. "They'll be looking for us to be in a car. Our best chance of getting away is on foot. Besides, we need to save our money. We don't know how long we'll have to live on it."

"He's right." Paul nodded thoughtfully. "We'll be better off travelling light."

"They're looking for a man and woman travelling with a boy," added Alex unsentimentally. "We might have a better chance if we split up."

"Good idea," said Jill. "You and I can go together, Alex, and—"

"No, Mom. I think each of us should cross the river separately."

She blinked, throttled back her automatic refusal. "Don't you think that would look weird, Alex, a ten year old boy all by himself?"

He shot her a look. "See, I'll find somebody to go across with."

It could work. "What if we can't find each other? You've never been in Mexico."

"Me neither," Paul said.

"We'll choose some place to meet. Look." Alex picked up a card wedged between the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers: What to see in Piedras Negras. "See this?" He pointed at a bright pink bandstand in the middle of a park. "It says this is in the centre of town. We can meet right there."

Jill shrugged her agreement, looked down at the table so Alex wouldn't see her tears. I'll never make it across, she thought. Not with the border patrol checking IDs of people going into Mexico. They'd be looking especially carefully for a woman my age with a face ruined by acne scars. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that Paul would take good care of Alex, but the pain of it swelled in her breast and flooded her eyes despite her best intentions.